Category Archives: scrum

When I first took on product management, I started learning techniques, like understanding the market, strategy, SWOT analysis. While I didn’t write “proper” user stories, I prioritized requirements, and was there for the team to describe scenarios, answer questions, update on news, test the application and give feedback. My time was split between doing “product management”

When people first try scrum, or TDD (or any new process), they feel uncomfortable. We “know how to do” stuff, but then we’re asked to try on something new. Then our comfort zone alarm goes off. We feel constrained. Scrum puts limit on sprints, so we’ll need to actually help the testers finish testing our story.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to be interviewed by Vasco Duarte for the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. It was a great privilege, also because Vasco is a prominent figure in the #NoEstimates community, which I like too. Anyway, the series contains 5 parts, each one around 5 minutes. There is also bonus

I didn’t think that my Story Points story would garner such attention. Reactions were divided to two groups: the “Great Post” type, short and supportive. And the “You’re doing it wrong” type, long and argumentative. I can’t fault people for telling me “You’re doing it wrong” after I used it in that post. It did make me

At Agile Israel conference, I was recruited to a “Hit The Experts” panel on engineering practices. Ok, I didn’t put too much of a fight. Most of the questions were not of the engineering nature, though. One of the questions went like this: We’ve adapted the Spotify model, and now there’s no specialization, expectations from

I usually make fun of the “become a scrum master in 3 days”. I mean, what can you learn in 3 days? Glad you asked. Once a year or so, I get a chance of going through an exercise with my army unit. These few days are plentiful of agile post material. I’ll try to cram

Are your daily meetings effective? When you ask what people want from daily meetings, the answer is that they’d be short. Or Shorter. These answers usually come from people who suffer from long meetings and many other meetings in general. They want to just get back to their work. However, focusing on the length of

The current buzz at the agile world is scale. Now that we know that agile looks golden, we want to apply it to everything. Agile started as a development team practice. Extreme programming, Scrum, Feature Driven Development, and others all originated in software development teams. Since they were successful, it made sense to apply those

Last time we looked at how things came to be. How things converged around a group of software developers in a ski resort: There were actual experiments in the field with reported successes. There was a funnel for communication to spread those ideas. And now there was a joint vision and a name. The agile

Every time and again, I go back to the “4 ways that agile is declining post” to see if it is still relevant. I don’t get disappointed. Now that I am a full time agile coach, I’m in a kind of a fix. Agile has crossed the chasm, and scrum won as we all know.